Avaliação do desempenho dos ciclos de filtração e regeneração dos meios filtrantes com limpeza por pulso de ar reverso

Abstract

The presence of particles after the reverse air pulse cleaning process inside the filter medium ensures the increase in pressure drop of the subsequent cycle. The performance of the filter medium after several filtration cycles and cleaning cycles with reverse air pulse is not clearly known. For this purpose, the main objective of this work was to investigate the performance of the filter medium with reverse air pulse cleaning through the study of cleaning efficiency and by observing the regeneration of filter media. The satisfactory performance of the experimental unit was observed in the preliminary trials during filtration and cleaning by reverse air pulse having polypropylene and acrylic as filter media and phosphate concentrate as particulate matter. It was found that the increase in the number of filtration and cleaning cycles had an influence on the behavior of the filter media, when the filtration velocity was kept at 4 cm/s, the pressure drop at 200 Pa and with pulse time of 200 ms. It was observed that, even with the heterogeneity of filter media, particles were trapped on the surface of the fabric and the number of particles retained increased with the increase in the number of cycles. When comparing the filter media submitted to two hundred filtration and cleaning cycles, it was found that the polypropylene filter presented greater permeability, greater specific resistance and cake porosity, greater amount of mass retained after cleaning and greater cleaning efficiency than the acrylic filter using the same operational parameters. However, the performance was satisfactory for both filter media which, despite their differences, showed to be adequate for the operations of filtration and reverse air pulse cleaning.